AUTHOR: Heller, Monica TITLE: Linguistic Minorities and Modernity SUBTITLE: A Sociolinguistic Ethnography, Second Edition SERIES TITLE: Advances in Sociolinguistics PUBLISHER: Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd YEAR: 2006
Judith M. S. Pine, Ph.D., Department of Anthropology, Pacific Lutheran University
SUMMARY This second edition of Heller's ethnography of L'École Champlain, a French-language school in Ontario, Canada, is an important contribution to a wide variety of discourses, is timely, and will be useful for scholars interested in the intersection between language use and power in a context which Heller, following Giddens (1990), refers to as hypermodernity. Based on fieldwork carried out from 1991-95, the volume is part of an important body of work based on participant-observation in and around the school (as exemplified in such classics as Eckert 1989; Heath 1983; Philips 1983; Willis 1977). As a sociolinguistic ethnography, the book is of interest to linguistic and cultural anthropologists more generally, and could easily be incorporated into upper division courses. It will be of interest, as well, to those concerned with the future of linguistic nationalism, the impact and process of bilingual education, linguistic capital and the value of language as commodity, and the use of language as a tool for constructing identity.
Heller approaches hypermodernity as a potentially positive condition of linguistic minorities, providing a means of escape from what Sissons (2005), in a related context, refers to as ''oppressive authenticity'', where pragmatic choices allow for internal diversity without diluting political legitimacy. This new bilingual interface with the world gains value, however, from the existence of some monolingual populations who become a source of authenticity and also a source of potential clients dependent on a bilingual elite. Bilingual education, as Heller reveals, does not create a level playing field, or result in harmonious, egalitarian multiculturalism, but rather inscribes a new set of norms and a new hypermodern hierarchy.
In organizing this book, Heller argues that the situation of linguistic minorities, the ecology of language ideology if you will, can best be imagined as kaleidoscope with shifting pieces which nevertheless tend to form discernable patterns. The book itself is then seen as a kaleidoscope, with each chapter representing the view after a twist of the lens. Through this kaleidoscope, we are given a glimpse of the discursive relationship between students and the school, where the school includes teachers, administrators, government agencies making policies affecting the school, and the communities which brought the school into existence and which continue to support it, while being constantly reminded of the diversity within each side of the discourse. The first half section of the book comes from the school's perspective, while the second section provides a view from the student side of the discourse.
In the first chapter, Heller provides a thick discussion of the theoretical conclusions which she reached as a result of considerable ethnographic work. She introduces the idea of the voyageur, the archetypical French Canadian fur trapper whose role has been taken up by Francophone students in a bilingual high school in Ontario. Casting these voyegeurs as heroes, who ''show us how to find new paths across unknown territory, how to find what we want, and how to create what we might become'', Heller intends not only an ethnography of bilingual education but also a road map of sorts, sketched on the back of an envelope, which may guide anyone once the familiar road signs of the politics of identity have lost their meaning.
The second chapter provides a detailed discussion of the context within which L'École Champlain came into existence. A focus on the structural conditions which underpin practice is congruent with the central argument of the book, which illustrates the impact of changes in local, national and international economic structures on both ideology and practice. In this chapter, Heller continues the theme of sustained ideological tension, pointing to the contradictory implications of the school's motto - Unity in Diversity - where diversity may describe a plural society which includes francophones but also the diversity of the francophone world. The school's own linguistic ideology is examined in the third chapter, and another aspect of the tension between homogeneity and heterogeneity comes into view, this time between the unifying force of a policy of French monolingualism in the school and the implicit diversity of French language inherent in an explicit emphasis on the production of français de qualité (quality French). Extended transcripts of code-switching and code-mixing speech events in this chapter are especially useful illustrations of the impact of ideological contradictions on actual practice.
The diversity of the student body is the focus of the fourth chapter. Looking at the situation of specific students, Heller explores the significance of bilingualism, as opposed to francophony, which forms the linguistic capital (Bourdieu 1994) to which students at L'École Champlain have access. This chapter explores the hierarchy within the school where, as Heller notes, ''bilinguals rule'', in great part through the manipulation of linguistic capital within the context of a clear division between public (francophone) space and private or backstage (bilingual, multilingual) space, which Heller calls ''playing the game''. Her documentation of struggles between the bilinguals and recent francophone immigrants for control of public space provides a nuanced view of a situation which might otherwise have been oversimplified in terms of either race or class.
In the fifth chapter, as the lens turns to click on the topic of gender, Heller's ethnographic approach again provides a level of nuance that illustrates the complexity within which the students re-produce hegemonic gender norms, while in Chapter Six detailed examples illustrate the discourses through which some immigrant students, using the tools made available by formal policies of racial and ethnocultural inclusiveness in North America, resist the homogenizing forces of both the school and the student body and create yet another position whose voices must be listened to.
Chapter 6, based on collaborative work in a drama class conducted by Mark Campbell, a member of Heller's research team, explores the role for francophony in the development of an ideology of diversity in the school, involving francophone African students whose experience does not fit well within the dichotomous tensions which had formerly defined the school. Peripheral to the struggles within which white students found themselves, the francophone Africans (or ''multiculturals'') challenged the European and Canadian oriented hegemonies of the school using the language of hip hop and a sense of shared political identity, becoming, Heller and Campbell argue, a new core exemplified by a political organization which came into existence during the student council elections of 1994.
In Heller's final chapter she develops a connection between Canadian language politics and what she refers to as the trajectory of the school and the trajectories of its social actors, made visible to us in the extensive ethnographic material in the book. She proposes the book as a model of the sort of work needed to give us a better understanding of the way that language operates in the construction and maintenance of political identity, and the potential for a politically stable pragmatic linguistic pluralism.
Heller closes the book with a reiteration of her contention that the structure of the politics of identity masks internal diversity, but increased value of minority languages [she seems to imply all rather than only some]. Authenticity moves from the political to economic realm, and the discursive practices which masked contradictions to political solidarity come into play to mask those dissonances as minority languages become valuable linguistic capital in an ''internationalizing political and economic order''.
EVALUATION The decision to ground this book firmly in ethnographic data is an excellent one, and examples gleaned through participant-observation and through interviews provide an invaluable foundation for the theoretical argument of the book. However, this close focus may contribute to the fact that the First Nations population of Canada is invisible. The sense of precariousness and endangerment surrounding Canadian French, the reason the school came into existence, has the unfortunate consequence of rendering invisible those speakers of minority languages with no state affiliation - namely First Nations peoples. Heller's contention that this book will be useful to speakers of minority languages in general is weakened by the absence of a discussion of the situation of speakers of First Nations languages in Canada the introduction and the conclusion.
The problem of authenticity, a problem which is central to the ethnography, has been a topic of considerable discussion in the on-going scholarly discourse on indigeneity (see, for example, Sissons 2005). While Heller touches on the homogenizing force of authenticity inherent in the school's desire to protect and reproduce Canadian French, the existence of privileged forms of French provide alternatives not available to speakers of what, for want of a better term, I will call indigenous languages, or, perhaps better, languages without nations. For these speakers, the condition Sissons (ibid) refers to as ''oppressive authenticity'', where culture and language are indelibly .linked in a national or global discourse to ''traditional'', ''native'', ''pre-modern'' conditions, is much more sharply defined. With no privileged form, speakers of nation-less languages must either assimilate to a dominant language or struggle to maintain a bilingualism which acquires value only in restricted markets.
The sense of linguistic and cultural endangerment which is experienced by French Candian francophones, and particularly by Québécois, is a vital element of the conditions described in this ethnography. However, the value of bilingualism which forms the counterbalance to this sense of endangerment rests, as Heller notes, on the fact that French is spoken elsewhere, that French is, in fact, not endangered at all. I hope to see, in the third edition of this book, a brief discussion of the position of bilingual speakers of minority languages such as Inuit, Tlingit or Kwakiutl, whose bilingualism won't enhance their chances to attend university or to get good jobs with multinational corporations, if only as a contrast to the situation of francophone Canadians.
REFERENCES: Bourdieu, Pierre. 1994. _Language and Symbolic Power_. G.R.a.M. Anderson, transl. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Eckert, Penelope. 1989. _Jocks and Burnouts: Social Categories and Identity in High School_. New York: Teachers College Press.
Giddens, A. 1990. _The consequences of Modernity_. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Heath, Shirley Brice. 1983. _Ways With Words: Language, life and work in communities and classrooms_. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Philips, Susan U. 1983. _The Invisible Culture: Communication in Classroom and Community on the Warm Springs Indian Reservation_. New York: Longman, Inc.
Sissons, Jeffrey. 2005. _First peoples: indigenous cultures and their futures_. London: Reaktion.
Willis, Paul. 1977. _Learning to Labor: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs_. New York: Columbia University Press.
Judith M.S. Pine, Ph.D. (University of Washington), is currently Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Pacific Lutheran University, Tacoma, WA. She works with speakers of Lahu in northern Thailand. Lahu, a Tibeto-Burman language, is the language of a heterogeneous group people who live primarily in the mountains of Southeast Asia and southwest China, held together in great part by their common language, of which there are several dialects. Her dissertation research focused on the relationship between rural Lahu in northern Thailand and the literacies at their disposal. She is currently working on a project which examines the way that Lahu language media is used in the construction of a transnational modern Lahu identity.
|